He was quoting from a survey.....

and would this be different if it was a Lee at the helm?

The best thing to do for any politician unless you are lee kuan yew is to keep quiet and when asked about it, toe the ambiguous neutral line.....so everyone else in ASEAN pandai pandai.....so question is, if it was still LHL at the helm, would this turn out to be the same? Or really Laurence Wong kantoi this time for being a little bit too smart and that SG's success is really dependent on the lee family and not just any other smart Sg person

We encourange both parties to dialogue for peace and stability and refrain from escalating the situation....this should be regurgitated ad nauseam

and not become a professor and start analyzing the situation....that's not the role of a sitting leader of another country

This post has been edited by feynman: Nov 27 2025, 12:36 PM

It got me thinking about why maddy was so obsessed with Japan.......it appears that he probably had a misguided understanding of Japan but can't blame him given that the 1980s were a different time and Japan was the country to be.

Japanese success is owed to the US. No one else in the world has the capacity to absorbed Japanese export surplus other than the US, more so after the 70s when Kissinger concluded that for the US to remain a dominant power, it had to enlarge the deficit, print money and make the world carry US debt. Japan grew rich because the US was able to buy its stuff, Europe with the exception of the UK, France and West Germany didn't have the wealth to eat up japanese goods

Success means export driven prosperity here. We see China follow a similar model but have since pivoted away since 2012, the export mix of chinese goods flowing into the US is very different from that of japanese goods flowing into the US in the 80s